


where ghosts paint the sunset

by grainjew



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, and youre both sad. and thaaats life!!, but neither of you even really know each other any more, sometimes youre just two people whose planets have been murdered by the master
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28391967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: There’s something to be said for shared experience, when your home planet’s been turned to ashes at the Master’s hands. There’s something to be said, for missing each other.After Spyfall, the Doctor and Nyssa talk.
Relationships: The Doctor (Doctor Who) & Nyssa of Traken
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21





	where ghosts paint the sunset

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kagehana_tsukio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kagehana_tsukio/gifts).



Terminus was a place that echoed. Even now, with two years of living here, two years of making a life here, Nyssa felt its ghosts packed tight, felt them walk with her through laboratories and corridors, felt them pick her words out of the air and repeat them into meaninglessness. She liked to imagine that they were Traken’s ghosts, sometimes, instead of people she’d never known. It made the ship feel a little more like home, instead of some far place she'd bound herself to with duty.

She was locking up the lab, now, filing the day’s notes, shutting drawers, double checking, triple checking. She was so close to a breakthrough, she knew it, and she wanted to stay and work until she made it there: but she made herself pause, and put everything away, and get some food and rest. She would be no use to anyone if she collapsed in the middle of her work.

She shut the door behind her. Locked it. Leaned against the corridor wall. Food, and then sleep, and then back to work.

Life on Terminus was an odd kind of monotonous, greying her velvets and tugging at her heart. The days weren’t all the same, not exactly. There was so much work to do here, between navigating Terminus Inc.’s bureaucracy, securing supply shipments and funding, concealing her work on synthesizing a cure to Lazar’s Disease as best she could until it was complete, managing the ship’s infrastructure, speaking with the patients and the dying, actually working on the cure, staying alive, that no two hours were the same. Likely she wouldn’t get another uninterrupted day in her lab for weeks. 

But it was still monotonous, and grey, and sterile, and when she wasn’t doing anything else, she was missing the quiet pastels of life on Traken, the way the plants bloomed and faded with the seasons, the routines and dances of care. Or she was missing the bustle of life on the TARDIS, endless arguments between Tegan and Adric or Tegan and Turlough or Tegan and the Doctor, the endless library, the endless joy of new horizons and lives saved, Tegan’s hand in hers. 

She missed a lot of things, these days. She couldn’t regret staying, here on Terminus with its ghosts and its echoes and its needs, but she missed a lot of things.

And then, like a sound summoned out of memory, she heard the TARDIS. 

She didn’t believe it, and then she did, and then she was running towards it through empty, echoing corridors, stopping in front of that familiar blue box, waiting for the door to open.

She couldn’t go inside. She wouldn’t let herself, not when she never quite knew where and when she’d come back out. Not when she had responsibilities, had duties and had ghosts. But the door — and the door was subtly wrong, from her memories, and the shape and dimensions, nothing was quite right — didn’t open.

Nyssa of Traken, Nyssa of Terminus, she took a deep breath and she knocked. 

Nothing happened, for a moment. Nyssa stepped back, and waited again, rubbing tiredness out of her eyes, and then the door squinted open to an unfamiliar humanoid whom Nyssa nonetheless recognized instantly.

The Doctor stood silhouetted in the doorway by a dimly-lit version of the console room, clenching a fist, dust-mantled. “Wh—” The voice was higher than Nyssa remembered, more frustrated. Their fist unclenched. “Nyssa?”

“Still can’t drive, can you, Doctor?” said Nyssa, smiling. 

“Nyssa,” said the Doctor again, quiet now. They stepped out into the harsh corridor light, and then shook their head, and then stepped backwards except that Nyssa reached for them, grabbed thin air. But that stopped them retreating entirely, and they stared at Nyssa with wide, unfocused eyes. “This is Terminus.”

“It is,” said Nyssa. “Doctor, are you well?”

The Doctor leaned back against the TARDIS doorframe, too measured to be casual, and let out a long breath through clenched teeth. And then they crinkled their eyes and smiled, not so wide as the first face of theirs Nyssa had known, not so steady as the second, but brilliant enough that Nyssa almost missed the brittleness of it. “Oh, brilliant! Never better! I took the fam to Kar-Charrat to meet the living rains, just a bit ago, and, Nyssa, you’ll never guess!” They gestured with their hands, choppy. “Afterward, we went for a picnic on the Eye of Orion! And this time, we…” They slowed, realizing. “We didn’t… even… get interrupted…”

They stopped smiling. Nyssa reached out an arm again, and they didn’t so much flinch away as happen to be where her arm wasn’t. There was dust all over them, red and almost sandy.

They were shorter, now. Still taller than Nyssa, but shorter than they’d been. Straight blonde hair and an outwardly-projected calm, like Nyssa’s Doctor, but that was all superficial. Nyssa’s Doctor had been calm in the way a pond was calm: with hidden depths, certainly, perhaps with fish or mud obscuring the bottom, but placid unless in storm. This new Doctor, Nyssa could already tell, was calm like a wide river was calm, glassy and still until you stepped beneath the surface and were swept away in a moment by its secret violent current. This new Doctor, Nyssa could already tell, was older, and was very nearly unrestrained.

Of course Nyssa knew about regeneration. She’d read through the TARDIS’s entire collection on it when she first stepped aboard, at least the parts of the collection that the TARDIS had deigned to translate to a language she could understand. It had been a present concern, considering she had just seen the Doctor die and be reborn, confused and ill. But more importantly it had been a distraction, from the ghosts of her home clamoring at her mind, from the Master twisting her father’s face into hatred and scorn. 

Tegan had torn her away from her studies, in the end, to drag her into some argument she was having with Adric, and, their fingers entwined, Nyssa trying not to take Tegan’s side as the Doctor did their best to fix breakfast, that had been the first moment Nyssa felt like maybe, the TARDIS could be home.

She hadn’t had such a moment, here on Terminus. She wasn’t sure she wanted Terminus to be home, no matter how much she refused to leave.

“Nyssa,” said the Doctor, softly. They were sitting down now, back against the TARDIS, and Nyssa slipped down the wall to join them on the floor. “Have you heard of the Time War?”

Nyssa thought about it. “I don’t know,” she said. She didn’t hear much, here on Terminus, but one of the patients might have mentioned something, sometime.

“You were bound to my personal timeline while we traveled together,” explained the Doctor, hands knitted together, as Nyssa adjusted her skirt so that it would stop bunching under her, “so the aftershocks of it wouldn’t have touched you until you left. But then—” They stared at Nyssa, and blinked, and looked anywhere else. “I killed them, twice over, except I didn’t, twice over.”

“Who?” said Nyssa. I killed them, said the Doctor, flat and bitter and straightforward. The Doctor she knew never liked to kill, and even less liked to admit straight-out that they were the cause of a death. They couldn’t have changed so much as all that. They couldn’t.

“The Time Lords,” said the Doctor, dropping each ponderous word so that echoes rippled against the corridor walls. “Gallifrey. Home.”

Nyssa swallowed. Traken, ghostly-pale and filamented in her memories. There had been a gladigeist tree in the gardens, a kind of citrus-y fruit. Tegan had wanted to try one, after Nyssa mentioned it one day, but it only lived in Nyssa’s memory, now. Nyssa whispered, “Why?”

“There was an enemy…” The Doctor tripped over their words, restarted. “We were fighting the Daleks.”

“I don’t understand,” said Nyssa. Why they had done such a thing. Why they were telling this to Nyssa, now and only now. Why the Doctor had killed, and was admitting it. Why they thought Nyssa had to know.

This Doctor was more colorful in their clothing choices than the Doctor Nyssa remembered. A rainbow, a coat the powder-blue of sky at midday, nothing immediately identifiable as edible. “It doesn’t matter,” they said, and made a face like eating a citrus. “Or maybe it does, talking to you. Nyssa of Traken, diplomat, scientist, last of her kind. But it doesn’t matter. I put it back, I put it back.” They were rambling. “I put it back, so it doesn’t matter, even though it was probably wrong of me. We were near as bad as them, by the end. From the beginning. But I put it back. Can’t undo that, can I?” They brushed dirt, dust off their shoulder, stared at their hand stained red. “But the Master can.” 

“The Master,” Nyssa repeated, and found her throat quite suddenly dry. She’d thought— 

She didn’t know what she’d thought. Perhaps she had simply hoped, that the Doctor could bring themself to stop loving him. That the universe would give Traken justice, somehow, after everything. But death for a death was no kind of justice, and a broken heart for broken bones wasn’t something she’d ever wish on a friend. 

So now, all she could hope was that the Master was no longer defiling her father’s face and hands. All she could hope, was for rest. 

"I've just come from Gallifrey," the Doctor blurted into Nyssa’s silence. They flicked their fingers, scattering red into the air. "It died. It's all dust and shattered glass. The Master killed it."

Nyssa remembered being jealous of the Doctor’s still-living homeworld. She remembered walking its halls, and seeing its people, and pointing a gun at its president, and she remembered being jealous that it still had too-opulent halls to walk, and self-absorbed people to watch, and a corrupt president to threaten, because as terrible as that all was, as terrible as it was that these people had set themselves up as Lords of Time and Masters of the Universe, at least they still existed. At least the Doctor still got to go home.

Nyssa remembered Gallifrey, stagnant, stiff, lifeless but alive. It was nothing like Traken’s lush gardens, like Traken’s greens and purples, like the way Traken’s edges softened and faded in Nyssa’s memories. Except that it was dead too. Except that the Master had killed it, too.

Nyssa wondered if the Doctor could still love the Master, now. She didn’t know what answer she would prefer.

Nyssa said, “I’m sorry.”

The Doctor blinked at her. Nyssa’s words were swallowed by the corridor almost instantly, small against its echoes, swallowed by its ghosts, and Nyssa reflected again on how adrift she’d been those first days in the TARDIS. How uncertain and how unbound, and how it had been Tegan taking hold of her hand more than anything the Doctor had done that had anchored her. 

“I didn't come to you before, when it was me who destroyed my home,” whispered the Doctor. They grimaced a little, mouth twisting on their strange new face, streaking lines across it as their own private ghosts. “It wouldn't have been fair to you, no matter how lonely I was. Not when it was my crime. But now…” They bit their lip. “I couldn't keep away, now. Not when I can't stop wondering how you kept going.”

All the sorries in the world wouldn’t have helped, all the Doctor’s fumbling attempts at showing her the wonders of the universe hadn’t helped, all the logic Adric had thrown at her hadn’t helped. Seeing the Master thwarted hadn’t ever helped, either, but it had at least felt satisfying.

She reached for the Doctor again, and again, the Doctor was where she wasn’t, like a four-dimensional flinch. Tegan’s hand had comforted her. Nyssa didn’t know how to comfort the Doctor, not if _I’m sorries_ meant nothing and she couldn’t reach out a hand and touch them. 

The Doctor looked small, like this, curled into themself against the TARDIS doorframe, and Nyssa wondered if they’d felt this way when they killed Gallifrey, too, or just when it was someone else. She wondered how they’d brought Gallifrey back, and why they hadn’t ever tried the same for Traken. Why they couldn’t do the same for Gallifrey, now. Again, she didn’t know what answer she would prefer.

Again, she wished for rest.

“You know how,” she said. She adjusted her collar, remembered Tegan showing her how to thread a daisy chain like she’d grown up doing back on Earth, remembered Tegan and Adric getting frustrated with the process and going off to jump in the nearby lake. The Doctor had sat with Nyssa, then, and they’d made daisy chains together, and crowned the other two when they got back, wet and arguing about who pushed who. So maybe the Doctor had helped, a little. “You know how,” she repeated. “You were there.”

The Doctor hesitated, and crinkled their face again, and opened their mouth, and closed it. They knit their fingers together, pulled them apart. The corridor floor was patterned in a layer of red gallifreyan dust. 

“I’m traveling with three people again, you know,” they said. “A little family. My fam. So I’ve been remembering when I wore celery and ran around with you.”

Nyssa tilted her head and narrowed her eyes and tried to twist her thoughts into coherent shape.

She could ask: Is that why you came to me, now and no other time, when it has only been two years for me: how many has it been for you?

She could ask: So you thought of us as your family, then, too?

She could ask: What happened to the Master?

She asked: “Where are they?”

The Doctor tucked hair behind their ear, sending up another puff of dust. Nyssa hoped, vaguely, that they had a vacuum in easy reach on the TARDIS, because otherwise all this dust would clog the air vents and choke the ghosts and Terminus would end up haunted by Gallifrey, too.

“Back home,” said the Doctor. Their hand twitched. “They’re back in their homes. They don’t know. They can’t know. Ryan, Yaz, Graham, wonderful brilliant humans, out to see the universe and I’m giving them that. I’m giving them the universe, all of space and time, or almost. They won’t know about Gallifrey. They shouldn’t have to.”

Almost, Nyssa reached for them again, but couldn’t bear a third rejection. “You know how I kept going,” she repeated, and hoped her words would touch some part of this closed-off parody of her Doctor that her hands could not. “You were there. Tegan was there. Adric was there. You all knew. You remembered Traken.” She paused, and heard a phantom echo meander down the corridor, imagined it was wind. “I remember Gallifrey.”

The Doctor shook their head. “Don— Do. Don’t. It’s my burden.”

“A burden is lighter shared between friends,” said Nyssa, quoting them, long ago, or perhaps quoting her mother, or perhaps a book. She didn’t know. There were ghosts in her mouth, and the Doctor wasn’t listening.

They stood up, one abrupt motion. 

“I shouldn’t be here,” they announced. They were still shaking their head. “Why did she bring me, I shouldn’t—” They stepped backwards into the TARDIS — tripped, fell, almost, grabbing at the doorframe, eyes widening. 

“Doctor—” said Nyssa, scrambling to her feet, tripping over her skirt. “Doctor, wait, please.”

The Doctor’s face crinkled again. Nyssa wondered if they were about to cry. 

“Goodbye, Nyssa,” they said, voice fast and thick and heavy. “You have a better heart than this old man deserves.”

And they shut the door, and Nyssa reached forward, and the TARDIS blinked noisily away, and red gallifreyan dust flew up like seaspray, and she was alone again.

Alone, with Terminus’s ghosts, and Traken’s ghosts, and Gallifrey’s ghosts now too.

Neither of them had helped the other in the end, not really. Nyssa kicked a puff of dust into the air, and tried not to be frustrated, and tried not to be worried, and failed. Neither of them had helped the other. Tegan had taken Nyssa’s hand and pulled her from the library back to life, and she could only hope the Doctor’s newest friends could do the same for them. She could hope hope for the Master to stop causing pain, and she could hope for rest, and she could hope for that.

And in the meantime, she would remember Traken and Gallifrey too, and she would do her endless duty by the people of Terminus. Starting by finding a broom.

**Author's Note:**

> [4:16 PM] grains emoji: nyssa voice i understand that you're gay but he destroyed my planet and possessed my dad
> 
> i got ambushed by dw brain again a couple weeks ago and decided to take the opportunity to finish this little piece that ive had a few sentences written for since early summer. We Are All Sad About Nyssa
> 
> i have a writing tumblr, [come say hi](https://grainjew.tumblr.com/)!


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